According to a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute/The Atlantic, most white evangelicals now believe that a politician can be immoral in private and ethical in public. That’s a significant shift from 2011, when less than a third agreed with the same position:

It’s tempting to pin this uptick solely to Donald Trump, but that doesn’t quite capture the full picture. White evangelicals are suffering from a scarcity of options: They can support a distinctly impious Republican, or a Democrat they’ve framed as America’s Jezebel for decades. This even applies to evangelical members of the Christian left, who don’t oppose a woman in power but may disagree with Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy or her historically conservative approach to poverty reduction. Many values voters feel they’ll compromise their morals no matter what they do on November 8.

These results also illustrate the central irony of the religious right. Politicizing Christianity also secularized it; no one, not even ardent churchgoers, can build a political machine without making compromises. Purists do not typically survive long in politics.

But there is one fascinating exception to PRRI’s trend: Religiously-unaffiliated Americans have actually become less tolerant of politicians they deem immoral. Who’s the moral majority now?

“As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process and I will not indulge it,” Rubio says in an ABC News interview Wednesday. “Further, I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.”

This underscores one of the great absurdities of this campaign. Donald Trump is out there gushing about his love for WikiLeaks now that the organization is leaking emails of Hillary Clinton confidants. But this is a group GOP leaders have condemned—even sought to label a terrorist organization—when it published classified documents related to national security.

Just to complicate the politics further, these Republicans had a key ally across the aisle in the fight against the group, a top Obama administration official who once said a WikiLeaks “disclosure is not just an attack on America— it’s an attack on the international community.” Her name was Hillary Clinton.

As Alex Shephard has previously noted, Republicans are already beginning to discredit the notion of a Clinton mandate by claiming that the only reason she will have won is that her opponent is Donald Trump. The latest evidence is this tweet by conservative commentator Erick, son of Erick:

Set aside the fact that the demographic realities of 21st-century America would make it difficult for even a generic Republican to win the presidency. The problem with Erickson’s argument is that it treats Donald Trump as separate from the Republican Party, when the Republican Party nominated one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic presidential candidates in modern history. That in and of itself proves that the party doesn’t deserve to wield political power, at least not without a long period of serious reflection and reform. By preventing the ascendance of a party rotting from the inside, Hillary Clinton will certainly have earned a mandate to rule.

The state’s online voter registration system crashed on Monday, the final day for Virginians to register to vote in the November 8 election. The state registrar said an unknown number of people were unable to register by the midnight cutoff, but the Stafford County registrar estimated to The Washington Post that “tens of thousands” of people were shut out. “It got inundated to the point where it was useless for everyone,” he said.

This is how elections are compromised. It’s not Hillary Clinton and the media somehow “rigging” it. It’s not Democratic voters rising from the dead. It’s when fallible systems—both human and electronic—fail to perform as expected. And that is almost certain to happen, to some degree, on election day. As Lauren Smiley writes in the latest issue of The New Republic,

[T]he biggest threat to the sanctity of the vote is the voting machines themselves. Like so much of America’s crumbling infrastructure, the systems we rely on to tabulate our votes fairly and accurately are in dire need of an overhaul. In thousands of precincts, the outcome of the election rides on equipment that’s outdated, prone to errors, and difficult or impossible to repair.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has already filed a federal lawsuit over the Virginia incident, arguing that the failed registrants’ constitutional rights were violated and calling for a three-day extension of the deadline. (Citing state law, Governor Terry McAuliffe’s office and state officials say they don’t have the power to do so.) Election day promises to be a whole lot messier. Machines will crash, irregularities will be reported. But when they do, the proper response from the American public will not be to parrot whatever conspiracy theory Donald Trump cooks up, but to demand that elected officials—starting with the incoming president—fix our country’s electoral infrastructure.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza watched Rubio’s opening statement in the Senate debate on Monday night in Florida and published a story concluding, correctly, that Rubio would’ve be a better general-election candidate for the GOP. Here are, in Cillizza’s words, “72 seconds that prove why Republicans would have been way better off nominating Marco Rubio”:

Cillizza writes:

Rubio’s personal story speaks to a fundamental belief in the country that you can be anyone you want to be if you work hard enough. Rubio’s is a positive story about what makes America exceptional — as told through the lens of his own personal experience. There is tremendous oratorical power in this line: “I have a debt to this country I will never fully repay.”

But all the qualities Cillizza loves—the uplift of Rubio’s personal story, the soaring rhetoric about America’s greatness—weren’t at all what Republican primary voters wanted this year. They weren’t feeling great about America. They weren’t in the mood for high-minded optimism. They wanted Donald Trump.

Rubio lost the nomination for those reasons and many others, including that he tried to be a little of everything to everyone and diluted the contrast he drew with Trump. Some of his failing was surely circumstantial—Jeb Bush made it impossible for him to be the sole champion of reform conservatism, or even to have one state to himself—but on Monday, Rubio continued to showcase his own shortcomings that hurt him earlier this year. He revived his infamously robotic debate mode, repeatedly saying “God willing” when asked whether he’d serve another full Senate term instead of running for president again. He also, of course, refused to rescind his support for the man who won the Republican primary fair and square.

As a psychological matter, President Obama’s approach to defending the integrity of our elections from Donald Trump—and to getting Trump to shift his focus from fictitious election-rigging allegations to less dangerous attacks—is probably the right one.

“I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place. It’s unprecedented,” Obama said Tuesday during a Rose Garden news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. “It doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you’d want out of a president. You start whining before the game’s even over? When things are going badly for you and you lose, you start blaming someone else? Then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job.... I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining, and go try to make his case to get votes.”

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, the Clinton campaign’s more cautious approach is meant to counterbalance Trump’s: Create an air of calm, so people aren’t intimidated out of going to the polls. But as the current president, and the most popular and trusted politician in the country, Obama’s scolding and taunting serves both to restore as much faith as possible in the system and to make Trump look petty and weak. This will resonate widely both because it’s so evidently true and because it’s likely to set Trump off on a new round of anti-Obama conniptions.

It’s just extraordinary and depressing that the current president has to defend the integrity of our elections from a Republican nominee with mind games meant to cause Trump narcissistic injury, and that Republican leaders, who all support Trump, don’t find this state of affairs alarming enough to speak up themselves.

The leaked emails show that Hillary Clinton’s initial long list of vice presidential candidates was organized into seven “rough food groups.” These groups were, apparently, as follows: Latino men, white women, boring ol’ white men, black men, buff military men, the 1 percent, and, last and seemingly least, man of the people Bernard Sanders. (Read the full email here.)

Javier Becerra
Julian Castro
Eric Garcetti
Tom Perez
Ken Salazar

Tammy Baldwin
Kirsten Gillibrand
Amy Klobuchar
Claire McKaskill
Jeanne Shaheen
Debbie Stabenow
Elizabeth Warren

Michael Bennet
Sherrod Brown
Martin Heinreich
Tim Kaine
Terry McAuliffe
Chris Murphy
Tom Vilsack

Steve Benjamin
Corey Booker
Andrew Gillum
Eric Holder
Deval Patrick
Kasim Reed
Anthony Foxx

John Allen
Bill McCraven
Mike Mullen

Mary Barra
Michael Bloomberg
Ursula Burns
Tim Cook
Bill Gates
Melinda Gates
Muhtar Kent
Judith Rodin
Howard Schultz

Bernie Sanders

It’s telling that so many business people, such as Apple’s Tim Cook and Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, were on the list—possibly a response to the Trump “businessman turned politician” phenomenon. And it’s interesting to note that the only black woman on the list is Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox. But the fact that Sanders is all alone is what really captures the theme of this election season.

Six months ago, Megyn Kelly asked Trump what his favorite book was, besides The Art of the Deal (which he didn’t even write). He said All Quiet on the Western Front, suggesting that he had not read a novel since he was 11. Kelly then asked him if he reads at all and Trump said this: “I read passages, I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time. When was the last time I watched a baseball game? I’m watching you all the time.” There could be only one conclusion: Trump doesn’t read books.

But in a 2005 op-ed, unearthed by The Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada, in which he complains about a book review, Trump makes it sound like he is [Bob Dylan voice] very well read:

Most writers want to be successful. Some writers even want to be good writers. I’ve read John Updike, I’ve read Orhan Pamuk, I’ve read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I’ll read one of his books. But it will be a long time—he was not born with great writing ability. Until then, maybe he should concentrate on finding his own “lonely component” and then try to develop himself into a world-class writer, as futile as that may be, instead of having to write about remarkable people who are clearly outside of his realm.

Trump clearly wrote (or more likely dictated) parts of this letter to the editor. “I have no doubt that Singer’s and MacGregor’s books will do badly—they just don’t have what it takes,” is very much in his register. The paragraph quoted above, however, is not. And if Trump really was such a fan of Updike and Pamuk and Roth, he might not have told Kelly his favorite book was All Quiet on the Western Front, because he would have had a lot of grown-up books to choose from. But I could be wrong. I’ve reached out to Trump to ask about his favorite novels by Updike, Pamuk, and Roth.

Speaking to Anderson Cooper, Trump used a familiar but disturbing argument to defend the fact that her husband has boasted about assaulting women: He’s just a big child. As she explained, “They were kind of a boy talk, and he was led on, like egged on, from the host to say dirty and bad stuff.” Throughout the interview, she kept reframing Trump’s words as just “boy talk,” which led to a memorable exchange:

Cooper: He described it as locker room talk, to you, you’ve sort of alluded to that, is that what it is to you as well? Just locker room talk?

Trump: Yeah, it’s kind of two teenage boys, actually they should behave better, right?

Cooper: He was 59.

Trump: Correct. And sometimes I said I have two boys at home, I have my young son and my husband, so, but I know how some men talk, and that’s how I saw it, yes.

The “boys will be boys” defense constitutes a particular type of sexism, one that has a maternalist flavor. By casting her husband as the “boy” she has has to look after, Melania Trump empowers herself on some level—she’s the adult in the room. But it comes at the expense of giving her husband a wider license, which extends to mistreating women in general. What’s good for Melania Trump on a personal level isn’t necessarily good for her gender—and indeed in this case they are in direct opposition.